I first noticed a problem with the concept of Christian worldview several years ago when I was researching the political ideas of the Dutch polymath Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Kuyper was one of the father figures of the Christian worldview concept. According to Kuyper, worldviews were like religious confessions, and they manifested themselves in cultural groupings in society. I was interested in investigating this for its potential as a framework for the governance of religiously diverse societies. However, the more I considered Kuyper’s application of his worldview concept to ideas like “Calvinist,” “Roman Catholic,” and “Liberal,” the more I found these worldviews difficult to define and even more difficult to deploy. Kuyper’s use of weltanschauung (the German word for worldview) seemed fuzzy at best, and sloppy at its worst.
It then dawned on me that worldview language was everywhere in Christian institutions — churches, schools, colleges and universities, campus ministries — and its typical use here was of the same quality as Kuyper’s. Most alarming to me was the realization that I was not exempt from this charge. I used the concept all the time, and I was as fuzzy and sloppy as anyone.
I had no initial need to overcome this difficulty, but the unsatisfactory aspects of the way Christian worldview was articulated became acute for me when I began teaching in a Christian higher education setting. I found the way that worldview was being deployed in the classroom, the lecture theater, and college marketing materials quite grating. What did we mean by “a Christian worldview perspective” or “teaching from a Christian worldview?” How does having a “Christian worldview” make a difference in learning how to become a good mathematics teacher, historian, or business owner? The setting where it became most frustrating was in the banal world of curriculum documentation. Every course at the college needed to have a learning outcome related to Christian worldview. This raised big questions for me. How do you frame a Christian worldview learning outcome for a course on, for example, ancient Greek and Roman poetry? Or what about a course on the history of World War II? Admittedly, this requirement to have a Christian worldview outcome could be dealt with in a bureaucratic way with little harm done. However, as I was teaching at an institution that prided itself on applying the Christian worldview in every discipline and across every course, the generality and lack of rigor with which the concept was being wielded across the board became a real challenge for me as an educator. I wanted to try and find a way out of, or a way through, the worldview mess. I chose the latter course.
The more I spoke to other people about my concerns, the more I came to believe I was not alone. Christian educators across the primary, secondary, and post-secondary sectors often find the concept difficult. They are invariably passionate about Christian education and often work in Christian institutions. Many of the teachers and professors I encounter at conferences, in professional development sessions, and on university and college campuses are compelled to think of their task in terms of Christian worldview formation and Christian worldview content. And yet they often felt as I did. The idea of a Christian worldview feels intuitively plausible, but when it comes to implementing the idea in the practical context of the classroom or lecture hall, the scope seems extremely limited.
My own teaching ranges across history, religion, philosophy, and literature, disciplines that offer rich opportunities to bring Christian thinking to bear on many topics. In general, the humanities seem to be a more flexible space for Christian worldview. And yet it remains a challenge, and doubts constantly arise. If you didn’t quote the Bible in the class, does it mean you failed to teach from a Christian worldview perspective? Maybe merely having Christian ideas or frameworks should be enough. But how do I know if my ideas are distinctively Christian? How do I know they’re not re-engineered liberal, secular ideas with a Christian garnish? And what about the possibility of truth being discovered outside the confines of the Christian community? Many cultures with quite varied belief systems have come to scientific, philosophical, and even religious truth without access to a Christian worldview perspective. Presumably, they did so through the use of their God-given reason. This raises the question of what role Christian revelation plays in academic disciplines. Do Christians even have privileged access to intellectual truth? These are the challenges I experienced as an educator, and they seem to resonate with many others across the Christian education sector.
I am not the first person to see problems with the way Christian worldview language is deployed in education. David I. Smith is one scholar who has suggested a different framing for Christian worldview and its relationship to Christian teaching. Smith’s solution is to move the conversation away from Christian perspectives on the subject matter and toward the actual practice of teaching. He is most interested in matters related to disposition and environmental factors, like the kinds of sample questions a textbook might contain. In On Christian Teaching, Smith draws our attention away from worldview issues in education and toward “the pedagogical process [and] the way the students experience and interpret learning.”
Another Smith, James K.A. Smith (who teaches at Calvin University with David I. Smith), has also tried to shift the conversation about Christian education away from the cognitive, rational, and intellectual aspects of Christian worldview by harnessing insights about formation from liturgical theory. For Smith, there is a need to reconsider the goals of Christian education and shift the focus from worldview toward liturgy, by which he means away from the rational and toward the affective. In other words, we should move away from the head and toward the heart when we think about Christian education. “If we,” Smith writes in Desiring the Kingdom, “think about learning in terms of liturgy — pedagogy as liturgy — then … we need a rearticulation of the end of Christian education.”
Both of these contributions have been broadly taken up in Christian education circles in ways that refine the way educators think about integrating Christianity into education. It seems to me that this broad uptake is, in part, a response to the challenges posed by applying worldview thinking in the classroom. Teachers pay lip service to Christian worldview, but it doesn’t translate because they feel it doesn’t work, and they’re looking for other options.
Despite the best efforts of very fine thinkers like David and James Smith, Christian worldview suffers from a lack of real definition. No less a luminary than Nicholas Wolterstorff has brushed aside worldview as a “vague notion.” And despite some scholars trying to refine our understanding of worldview and education, the problem that Wolterstorff identified remains. Contra a figure like Abraham Kuyper, worldview cannot simply be used to divide up scientific knowledge and different ways of attaining that knowledge. I affirm, with Wolterstorff, that central tenets of a person’s beliefs about reality should not be arbitrarily abstracted as pillars of their so-called worldview. What does it even mean to do such a thing? No one has yet explained it in a satisfactory way.
Nevertheless, worldview thinkers often do just this without any justification. All too often, tenets of belief are set apart as crucial to a person’s or people’s worldview. Some will argue that we can analyze worldviews through answers to set questions. While he doesn’t suggest they are sufficient for worldview analysis, N.T. Wright posits these questions: Who are we? Where are we? What is wrong? What is the solution? “All cultures,” states Wright in The New Testament and the People of God, “cherish deep-rooted beliefs which can in principle be called up to answer these questions.” This might be true, so far as it goes. But the obvious problem is which questions to ask. Are these questions, or any other set of questions, the right ones to ask? Why privilege a question about human origins above a question about beauty, for example? Or why privilege epistemology over the question of social justice? And why stop at four questions, or eight? Perhaps there is, in the end, only one question. There is even contention over the number of worldview questions people can keep in their heads. Not everyone uses this focus on questions to ground their analysis, but the problem is not resolved because the criteria by which someone decides the “ins and outs” of a Christian worldview are still arbitrary and often at odds with the criteria used by other worldview analysts.
The problem is that the concept of worldview is vague. Certain ideas feel important, look neat lined up together, and subsequently get rolled out as if they are definitive for a given person’s worldview. It might be argued that if we get these key worldview ideas right, the rest of someone’s thinking will sort itself out, and they will start to think in a Christian way. This understanding of worldview, which I will label deductive, assumes that starting with the right Christian worldview categories, concepts, and ideas will lead to right thinking and true knowledge. This puts the metaphorical cart before the horse. Christian worldview thinking is seen as the means, the way, by which education institutions can offer a Christian education. The most common way this manifests is in the claim to be teaching from a “Christian worldview” perspective, offering correctives to false worldviews. This is a deductive framing of worldview, which starts from high-level first principles, which then (apparently) determine the shape of the rest of someone’s view of life. The details of one’s life and thinking are then made to fit into the high-level principal worldview markers. But what are these worldview markers (for want of a better term)? It seems that apart from personal intuitions and aesthetic preferences, there is no substantive reason why certain issues or certain questions are central in framing this thing we call a worldview.
These problems with worldview have become more evident in recent years because of our changing cultural context. The original context for the formation and deployment of Christian worldview thinking was quite different from our own. The earliest Christian worldview thinkers of the 19th century, right down to the apologists and theologians in the late 20th century, all used the concept in contexts where Christianity had cultural currency. The Christian worldview concept was also used in live intellectual combat; it could be used to defend Christian doctrine and fend off hostile attacks from enemies of the faith. At least, that is how its exponents saw it.
Many Christian education institutions emerged in the context of cultural crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, with Christians responding to the sexual revolution and the rising prominence of evolutionary theory with worldview guns blazing. The posture adopted was defensive, and worldview was a defensive weapon. This approach was plausible because Christianity was still a positive cultural force, and bullish worldview-style apologetics could be wielded effectively. But everything has changed.
Christianity has moved from being a cultural positive to a cultural negative, and many of these old-style arguments are no longer heard, taken seriously, or comprehended by our culture. We need to respond to this by shifting the way we engage the culture. Just as we need to think differently about worldview, we also need to shift the way we think about education. We cannot simply ward off the evil outside the metaphorical gates, as in the old approach to Christian worldview education. We must also cultivate our own people and disciple our children with a positive vision of Christian worldview.
I argue for a kind of philosophy of worldview education that provides a basis for a proactive Christian approach to education, rather than the defensive one so prevalent from the 1970s onward. I am not saying that we should abandon worldview altogether. Despite the problems with worldview thinking, the solution is not to do away with the concept but to reform it. In reforming worldview, we can also reform our philosophy of Christian education. We are to form our students’ worldviews rather than defend prefabricated worldview positions. We are making disciples, not just protecting them.
Adapted from Against Worldview by Simon Kennedy. Published with permission from Lexham Press.
